Silas sat head in hands. “Who else knew about it, Jack?”

  “No one. Just Caleb. He wouldn’t have cut the rope. He paid for that windlass himself, and it was hard work setting it up together. Don’t make no sense.” Jack stood and began pacing, jaw tight, hands opening and closing at his sides.

  Caleb. The mine foreman. I would not have thought him a moonshiner.

  “Someone cut it,” Ike observed.

  Silence clung to the air.

  Eventually Ike continued, “Maybe not though." He scratched at his curly salt and pepper beard. "Could those things, those Charmers, have cut the line?”

  I didn’t like remembering the Charmer’s grasp, but I had never seen tooth, nor claw. Could they get in here? Certainly they could force the door. I tried to imagine one of those things picking up a knife or saw. Ridiculous.

  Martha looked at Ike. "Well, they sure couldn't have got all the way up there right Ike? They can't move through solid stone."

  Ike studied her, then slowly nodded. He put on a smile that didn't reach his eyes.

  The room eased, like an exhale long held. I looked between Ike and Martha. Ruth was looking at them too. She stood by her husband Bemusedly. Something significant passed between them. Between all four of us, for I was included in this unspoken alliance now. Martha gave a slight nod, heavy with meaning.

  Then I knew. They didn't believe their own words. Neither did I. None of us knew a damn thing about those horrors, for all I knew they could use a knife, and pass through stone as if it were air. It was obvious however that these haggard survivors needed surety.

  I kept quiet

  Before long our little community of stable dwellers began spending more time in the still chamber.

  Bags of corn and grain poured forth their bounty. Several weighty sacks would never fulfill their moonshine destiny. With the still out in the open, Jack did not resist sharing. The foodstuffs could be boiled into a bland but fortifying mush. He seemed eager to repair his standing after recent events. When Seamus and Ike stumbled upon the moonshine and began drinking in earnest, Jack did make a fuss, but it did no good.

  “Not my White Dog!” Jack had pleaded. He was ignored, and after a while he accepted the loss with fortitude and joined in.

  Everyone wanted fresh air. The top of the shaft was so far above that, under other circumstances, the cavern would have felt dank and dim. Compared to the stable, it was like stepping into a spring meadow thick with bluebell and trillium. Even the stable felt less stale with air now moving through it. Folks dragged hay into the chamber and made rough seats in the light.

  At one point I gazed long at the uneven mouth of that opening above us. In my hand rested a tin cup of White Dog. The snow had ceased and started up again a time or two. To see daylight through distant maw and yet be unable to reach it was maddening. The cavern roughly domed outward and away from that opening. That hempen rope had been as thick as my wrist. Without it suspended above, there wasn’t a chance.

  Only the mules showed no interest in the new chamber. Them and the afflicted Miner. The Mules chewed steadily, their banishment to this darkness long accepted. We tried to coax the woman into the chamber, thinking the air would do her good, but no one wished to force her. I joined the attempt, and so learned her name was Sally. The mine had taken her husband and son long before this disaster. Officially an accident.

  For my money, every past death in the mine was now suspect given the Charmers and this cut rope.

  I had spent my first night in the mine unconscious after our encounter with them. I now thought of them as Charmers myself. It was a fitting name in its fatal irony.

  By afternoon my internal clock aligned with the sunlight above the shaft, and that small certainty was more comforting than I expected.

  What followed as afternoon waned into evening was both foolish and predictable. Jack’s White Dog could have stripped rust from an old gate, but it eased aches and dulled memory. Most of us overindulged.

  Reaching into that inner icy dam to flush out Jack’s deception had given me clarity when I needed it. That much was true. It sharpened my thoughts into a straight line. It numbed the pain and let me move when I hadn’t the strength. The reckoning came later. Pain deferred returned tenfold. So, I was grateful for the relief, even if it meant drinking White Dog. It’s only redeeming quality was that it smelled of sweet corn.

  I settled near Ike and Ruth on a pile of hay. Seamus and Esther sat back-to-back atop a barrel, his fiddle tucked beneath his chin. They held the room in rapt attention. She slapped the wood to keep time.

  As I watched them, I tapped my foot merrily even as I noticed something strange. The air around them shimmered faintly, like heat rising. His tenor and her alto braided together as moonshine braided with fiddle. They sang a fast patter song he had belted in the tavern many times before, though now they tailored the words seemingly on the fly in call-and-repeat fashion.

  Cut a jig, bow an’ fiddle t'banish ghosts and charmer

  A brand new pair of brogues to rattle over'em all

  Right out of this hole on the rocky road to Arner

  A one, two, three, four, five

  Don’t swing the pick, step it quick down the rocky road

  Out the mine and into Arno, whack-follol-de-dah

  I was impressed by the wordcraft, but I took exception to one alteration: Changing Arno to Arner to force the rhyme. Still, they seemed drunk as the rest of us, so I resolved to overlook that transgression.

  The shimmer, around them spread and spread as they played, before long it was all over the room. I could not say whether I saw it or sensed it by some faculty I did not yet understand. A familiar buzzing crept into my mind, the same vibration I had felt after the Charmers held us in their sway. The fiddle bore that buzzing to my ear then as well. It had warned me, though to no avail. Now it coaxed me to laugh, to drink, to surrender to rhythm without thought. Even through the haze of liquor I felt the pull beneath it, and it was stronger than before.

  Ruth held herself apart from the merrymaking. While Ike slapped his knee beside her, she sat stiff. Her knee began to bounce in time with Esther’s rhythm. When she saw me watching, she pressed it down firmly. She shot me a sidelong glance.

  Folks danced here and there. A couple slipped behind a mound of hay together. I felt a foolish grin stretching across my face. Then a thought struck me. Was this their doing? The grin slid off my face. Were Seamus and Esther charming us. I feared to follow that thread any further.

  “Where’s Sally?” Ruth stood in the portal between the still chamber and the stable.

  I looked up sharply. No one else seemed to notice her. She was just a few feet from where I sat at the edge of the crowd. From this vantage I could see much of the stable. Indeed Sally was not in her accustomed spot facing the stable doors. I had not seen her move yet in all the time I’d been here. I saw no sign of her. I sat up a little straighter. I looked around the still chamber.

  “SALLY’S GONE!” Ruth’s voice cracked off the stone shrilly.

  The fiddle faltered. It was as if a bucket of cold water had been thrown over us all.

  Ike hurried to his wife. Others followed. Soon, the whole crowd shuffled that way.

  I heard Ike’s voice carry back into the chamber. “She’s gone.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Though I felt the urgency, I stayed put. My injured state had taught me not to move unless I must.

  Silas returned, his tattered gray officer’s cloak trailing behind him. “It’s all right. The bar is still over the door.”

  “How’d she leave then?” Ike demanded.

  “She could lift it. I can,” Martha said.

  At her feet Mato played with little mules fashioned from straw. John came and gathered him up, almost instinctively, as the tension in the room mounted palpably.

  “That’s right, Miss Martha,” Ike said slowly. “But she couldn’t bar it again from the other side. So we’ve got two choices. Somebody let her out, or there’s another way out we don’t know about.”

  Jack looked stricken. I searched his face for deceit and found none.

  Everyone scrambled to search the space. Hay was tossed, people moved supply barrels to search the uneven crevices scarring the walls. The mule’s ears went back with this new commotion.

  A shuffle came from outside.

  “I’m cold,” a voice whimpered.

  Everyone went stock still.

  “Sally?” A woman I hadn’t met stepped forward, eyes bright in the lanternlight.

  Now I rose, jaw clenched against the grind of my ribs. I wrapped an arm around my middle and hobbled my way into the stable. Something was off about that voice to my ear.

  By the time I reached the portal the woman was already lifting the bar.

  Beneath the door glowed a pale, familiar light.

  I drew breath to shout, but Ike beat me to it.

  “Don’t!”

  It was too late. Just as the bar slipped above the slots, the doors burst inward. The solid door launched the woman backward into a support beam. Wood cracked. A lantern fell, shattered, and flames raced hungrily across the straw.

  My hand instinctively went to my hip. I had never regretted leaving my Colt behind more.

  “Edna!” A man screamed.

  I saw four or five of those nearby the woman, Edna presumably, rush in to help.

  The usually docile mules screamed and tore against their tethers.

  A Charmer shot inside like a striking snake and wrapped Ike, dragging him into the shaft faster than I could have cleared leather, and I was a damn quick draw.

  “NO!” Ruth screamed as she surged forward, her voice cracking like thunder.

  Silas outpaced her. A red hue flared around him, no longer a shimmer but nearly solid. Every other stride it shaped itself like a rampant bear. Without slowing he seized a rusted axle from beside the doors. The wheelboss remained fixed to one end, hidden beneath hay until now. The thing must have weighed as much as Martha.

  I tried to move. Pain was not the only thing deterring me. My thoughts felt thick, my limbs heavy, like I stood neck-deep in molasses.

  Seamus strode forward, his face now stripped of mirth. He set bow to fiddle. The sound that burst forth unlike any I’d heard from him before. The strings rang like a smith’s hammer striking hot iron.

  The buzzing in my skull returned in force. It urged me to wake.

  Realization thundered. The Charmers had been working into our minds again, dulling us, guiding Edna’s hand, slowing our bodies. Perhaps even drawing Sally out. Seamus was pushing back. Esther rushed up and placed her hand on his shoulder. The fiddle rang sharper and clearer somehow. People straightened. My vision sharpened. That call to wake now came with an invigoration. I lowered my head and got moving.

  Outside, in the primary tunnel, Iron rang on stone and flesh.

  Ruth disappeared through the doorway following in Silas’s unnaturally fast footsteps.

  I forced myself forward through the heat and smoke as others labored with blanket and shovel to smother the fire. My vision blurred with tears.

  In the shaft beyond, Ike hung about halfway between floor and roof, gripped in a coiling length of pale horror. The mule cart rail ran down the center, vanishing into darkness. The Charmer’s body extended beyond sight along that same line.

  Silas hammered the Charmer again and again. Thick, dark fluid spewed forth at each point of impact. Whatever flowed in the Charmer’s veins, it was not the red blood of man. It lashed Silas aside and he struck the rock hard enough to shake dust loose from the ceiling. A scream caught in my throat and came out as a hacking cough.

  On the edge of that drifting cloud stood Ruth, one hand raised. A brilliant beam shone from her palm, sharp and directional. It was by that light I now understood I had seen anything at all. The Charmer had snuffed its own glow.

  “Ike! Come on, Ike!” Ruth screamed.

  Ike’s mouth moved, though I heard nothing over the thrashings of the creatures and Silas’s deep roar as he charged back.

  Faintly at first, then brighter, small lights formed around Ike in straight horizontal lines. Words. Script blazing to life, as if quilled by an unseen hand. My mouth gaped. He slammed his free palm against the Charmer’s body.

  The creature went rigid.

  A tone both wet and metallic echoed. My breath caught in my throat.

  Only then did I see. The Charmer had been cut clean through. The end holding Ike Severed in a short diagonal where his palm struck. The mine groaned and shook. I lost my footing, as did Ruth.

  Ike fell wrapped in slack coils. The length beyond the cut withdrew rapidly into darkness.

  By the time I regained my feet and reached them Silas leaned heavily on the axle, chest heaving, blood and filth streaking him. Ike struggled free. Ruth’s beam flickered and died plunging us all into darkness. Relief suffused me.

  Then I saw them.

  One light. Then two. Then ten. Wisps advanced swiftly down the rail.

  My chest tightened. The power pressed at me pressuring the dam of ice. Asking.

  I had no Colt. No instrument through which to exercise deadly skill, long practiced.

  The others followed my gaze. A collective groan rose from them. They were spent.

  Smoke and orange glow still spilled from the stable behind us.

  The pressure again, weaker this time. I reached inward and placed a palm on the ice dam. The power connected through it. Cold flooded my veins. Pain dulled. The world sharpened.

  Realization struck.

  I had never seen eye nor ear of any kind on these creatures. Charmers. It's what they did, they got in your head. They hunted by using your own mind to locate you. They needed no other sense organs.

  I pictured the dam in my chest. I thought of that choice to freeze the rising power. Only yesterday, before I entered this hell, though it felt like years had passed since. I remembered the way the power broke on that inner dam in my mind.

  The lights came on faster and faster now. Gathering speed.

  I took the inward dam of ice and projected it outward. I grunted as I heaved as if under heavy weight. I thought if my dam could halt that rise of power, maybe it could block these creatures from invading our minds. A desperate gamble, but all I had.

  I imagined it blocking the tunnel, then more, surrounding the speeding creatures. Pressing them. No physical presence, no visible wall of ice, but a palpable barrier all the same. I saw a ripple of awareness pass over my three friends as the unseen dam locked into place.

  The effect was immediate. The Charmers halted abruptly. Then stiffened, exerting a force of their own.

  My effort was dearly bought. My vision narrowed. A trickle of warmth snaked from my nose and down my chin. Fouling the new beard sprouting there. The ice inside fractured and ground.

  “Back to the stable,” I forced out. “Bring fire. Bring anything. I don’t know how long I can make’em think before they force through.”

  “Think?” Ike rasped.

  “GO!”

  Ruth pulled him away.

  Silas dragged the axle beside me and planted it, wheelboss end, on the ground. “I ain’t leaving you, Tom Hale. Come hell or high water.”

  Sweat poured down my spine. The charmers remained halted, but they were pushing back. As one. I recoiled, it was as if my back met that dam of ice as I was pushed back. Between those two forces, I clung desperately.

  Soon I would be mentally crushed between. What that would mean for me, I didn’t like to dwell on.

  The lights blinked from left to right. I felt the pressure ease, for a moment. Hesitate, like the Charmers recalibrated. A heavy footfall echoed, deep and deliberate. I now understood that something vast had passed in front of them.

  “What fresh hell…?” Silas murmured.

  My strength failed. I sank to my knees. The dam within was fractured, but already re-freezing. Consolidating.

  The lights rushed forward again, growing larger on approach.

  Lanternlight flared behind us for a moment. Whispers reached my ear. Then sound and movement suddenly stopped.

  Before us stood what I mistook for a fallen shear from the tunnel ceiling, coal black.

  Then it moved.

  It crouched broad and low, the forelimbs heavier than the rear, the shoulders rising in a great rolling hump. The hindquarters were thick and rounded with weight. It took two steps and the floor tremored in answer. Stone screeched beneath hooked claws.

  The head lifted.

  My mouth went dry.

  The head was the size of a cart-wheel. Ears small and tight against the skull. Not serpentine. No goat-headed devil from St. John’s visions. Animal and stone made one.

  I struggled to grasp its shape. Lanternlight died upon its bulk, swallowed whole save where sharp edges caught and cast it back in hard planes. Not fur. Something like black glass set fast.

  It rose.

  The forequarters lifted, weight shifting back. Its height climbed upward and upward. My neck cramped as I fought to follow it. My lungs refused breath. Its chest was broad as a door, its forelimbs long and terrible.

  It turned its head toward me, and the sound was like a grinding millstone.

  Its eyes were white as the driven snow. Fathomless.

  I trembled under their weight.